THE BLUES

A contemporary blues artist offers a provocative recasting of the standard narratives.

Grammy Award–winning musician King argues that nearly everything you know about the blues is wrong: The music does not trace its origins to Africa, did not develop from slave songs, and did not then move to the cities and the North. On the contrary, writes the author, the blues has been sophisticated city music from the start, with New Orleans as its cradle. King was born into this blues narrative in 1962. His father owned a legendary bayou juke joint, and he had his son playing guitar with him by the time he was 7. As the music spread from the city through the South via recordings and radio, it morphed from full-band arrangements to the more affordable and accessible solo acoustic guitar. White carpetbaggers and the “Blues Mafia” have ever since prized the rawer sounds of the blues as more authentic, reinforcing a racial bias of primitivism. As a Black blues artist who initially earned favor from these White gatekeepers—and then experienced resistance in his attempts to fuse the blues and hip-hop—King has a legitimate ax to grind, and he grinds it sharply. Much of the material about the music’s development concerns what others call jazz, which the author dismisses as a White term, along with Dixieland and bebop. Since blues-based rock had its boom in the 1960s, the racial dynamic has become even more twisted. The blues audience has continued to trend White, and many popular artists are White as well even as Black culture moved past the blues as anachronism. King received a career boost as a period-piece bluesman in O, Brother Where Art Thou? while on his own recordings, he notably advances the form with his hip-hop fusion. “My influence was everywhere,” he writes, suggesting he has inspired everyone from Kanye West, to Timbaland, to the White Stripes.

A passionate narrative that will attract attention, debate, and ruffled feathers.